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Mental health disorders are among the leading worldwide causes of disease and long-term disability. This issue has a long and painful history of gradual de-stigmatization of patients, coinciding with humanization of therapeutic approaches. What are the current trends in Russia regarding this issue and in what ways is it similar to and different from Western countries? IQ.HSE provides an overview of this problem based on research carried out by Svetlana Kolpakova.

On September 5, Laurie Manchester, Associate Professor of History at Arizona State University, presented her paper on voluntary repatriation of Russians from China to the Soviet Union between 1935 and 1960. The presentation was part of the research seminar, ‘Boundaries of History’, held regularly by the Department of History at HSE University in St. Petersburg. HSE News Service spoke with Laurie Manchester about her research interests, collaborating with HSE faculty members, and the latest workshop.

Dr. Sabyasachi Tripathi, from Kolkata, India, is a new research fellow at HSE University. He will be working at the Laboratory for Science and Technology Studies of the Institute for Statistical Studies and Economics of Knowledge.

The International Conference On Motivation, organized by the University Of Helsinki will take place from 12th June to the 14th June 2014 at the University of Helsinki in Helsinki, Finland. The conference will cover areas like Motivation.

We conducted a psychometric evaluation of the "relative autonomy continuum" postulated by Selfdetermination theory (SDT), a continuum whose validity has recently been questioned. We started by a) examining all of the RAI items we could find, across multiple published and unpublished scales; b) extracting the core repeating words and concepts via paired-item paraphrase analysis; and c) expressing all of the resulting concepts in 38 simple, clear new items. We administered the 38 items to multiple Russian and American samples, asking participants to rate their academic motivations. Initial psychometric analyses eliminated several items, leaving 35 items for analysis. The traditional RAI dimensions of amotivated, external, introjected, identified, and intrinsic were confirmed via confirmatory factor analyses, simplex congruency analyses, and multidimensional scaling (MDS) analyses. We also tested a sixth dimension first proposed by Assor, Vansteenkiste et al. (2009), positive introjection, and confirmed its location between negative introjection and identification on the relative autonomy continuum. In addition to confirming the predicted sequence of the items and the six subscales along a primary dimension, MDS analyses also identified a second dimension corresponding to the distance of the item from the center of the continuum, suggesting that using weighting procedures when constructing aggregate motivation scores may be justified. In an attempt to provide the field with a standardized relative autonomy index (SRAI) with known properties, that can be flexibly applied to assess motivation in any and every behavioral domain, we empirically compared several methods of scoring and analyzing the data, focusing on maximizing the associations between academic motivation and subjective well-being. These scoring methods included computing and analyzing each of the six subscales separately; computing and analyzing autonomous and controlled motivation separately; computing a relative autonomy score (autonomous minus controlled motivation); and computing relative autonomy scores in which greater weight is given to subscales nearer to the two extremes of the continuum. Weighted and Unweighted RAI scores predicted SWB equally, indicating that unweighted scoring, which minimizes the number of assumptions made, should be preferred. The positive effect of autonomous motivation was stronger than the negative effect of controlled motivation; intrinsic and introjected motivation were the strongest stand-alone predictors among the 6 sub-scales.

This study investigates how the sociometric popularity of schoolchildren is related to individual academic achievements in a context of different levels of academic culture and educational aspirations in the classroom. The sample includes 5058 students in 270 classes from 98 schools in St. Petersburg. To examine class-level effects, we employ multi-level hierarchical models using HLM 7 software. Different effects for boys and girls were found, indicating that the relationship between academic performance and popularity is gender-specific. The results demonstrate that in classes with a low learning motivation individual academic achievements of boys are negatively related to their popularity, while in classes with a high academic culture the relationship is positive.

This paper examines the impact of family income on the results of the Unified State Examination (the
USE) and university choice in Russia. We argue that, even under the USE, which was introduced
instead of high school exit exams and university-specific entrance exams, entrants from wealthy
households still have an advantage in terms of access to higher education, since income positively
affects USE scores through the channel of a higher level of investment in pre-entry coaching.
Moreover, richer households make more effective decisions about university. We have found positive
and significant relationships between the level of income and USE results for high school graduates,
with an equal achievement before coaching. We subsequently propose that students from the most
affluent households do invest more in additional types of preparation (pre-entry courses and individual
lessons with tutors), and those extra classes provide a higher return for children from this particular
income group. Finally, we show that holding the result of the USE equal, students with good and fair
marks from wealthy families are admitted to universities with higher average USE score than those
from poorer families. As a result, we can observe that income status is a factor that significantly
influences enrollment to university.

Exposure to prenatal androgens affects both future behavior and life choices. However, there is still relatively limited evidence on its effects on academic performance. Moreover, the predicted effect of exposure to prenatal testosterone (T) - which is inversely correlated with the relative length of the second to fourth finger lengths (2D:4D) - would seem to have ambiguous effects on academic achievement since traits like confidence, aggressiveness, or risk-taking are not uniformly positive for success in school. We provide the first evidence of a non-linear relationship between 2D:4D and academic achievement using samples from Moscow and Manila. We find that there is a quadratic relationship between high T exposure and markers of achievement such as grades or test scores and that the optimum digit ratio for women in our sample is lower (indicating higher prenatal T) than the average. The results for men are generally insignificant for Moscow but significant for Manila showing similar non-linear effects. Our work is thus unusual in that it draws from a large sample of nearly a thousand university students in Moscow and over a hundred from Manila for whom we also have extensive information on high school test scores, family background and other potential correlates of achievement. Our work is also the first to have a large cross country comparison that includes two groups with very different ethnic compositions.

Institutions affect investment decisions, including investments in human capital. Hence institutions are relevant for the allocation of talent. Good market-supporting institutions attract talent to productive value-creating activities, whereas poor ones raise the appeal of rent-seeking. We propose a theoretical model that predicts that more talented individuals are particularly sensitive in their career choices to the quality of institutions, and test these predictions on a sample of around 95 countries of the world. We find a strong positive association between the quality of institutions and graduation of college and university students in science, and an even stronger negative correlation with graduation in law. Our findings are robust to various specifications of empirical models, including smaller samples of former colonies and transition countries. The quality of human capital makes the distinction between educational choices under strong and weak institutions particularly sharp. We show that the allocation of talent is an important link between institutions and growth.

This research focuses on estimating the signalling role of education on the Russian labour market. Two well-known screening hypotheses are initially considered. According to first of these, education is an ideal filter of persons with low productivity: education does not increase the productivity of a person, but it does give him the possibility to signal about his innate productivity via an educational certicate. The second of these hypotheses admits that productivity actually does increase during the period of study, but nevertheless the main objective of getting an education is to acquire a signal about one's productivity. Information theory suggests that employees use education signals during the hiring processes whereby employers screen potential employees. Employers and other categories of self-employed workers are usually not screened by the labour market via their educational attainments. Comparison of the returns to education of employees vs. self-employed workers could show the difference between the returns to signals and the returns to human capital. Yet another way to understand the signals is to consider the time dynamics of the returns to education for employees staying in the same firm. This helps us to answer the question about whether the signals are valuable only during the hiring process, or whether they remain valuable during the whole experience with the firm. This research is based on the Mincerian-type earnings functions, estimated on RLMS-HSE and NOBUS data. On the basis of the available information, we cannot say that the returns to signals and human capital differ significantly in Russia. Nevertheless we can say that, for the majority of men, the return to educational signals decreases with time spent in the same firm, while we observe the opposite for women.

This article is talking about state management and cultural policy, their nature and content in term of the new tendency - development of postindustrial society. It mentioned here, that at the moment cultural policy is the base of regional political activity and that regions can get strong competitive advantage if they are able to implement cultural policy successfully. All these trends can produce elements of new economic development.